Sunday, September 29, 2013

UC Administrators, the Universities' Own Worst Enemies

Since
protests and direct action emerged on University of California campuses as the
only tool at students’ disposal to resist soaring fees and diminished funding
in 2009, one of the key criticisms of the administration has been its own
bloat.This was both the weakness and
strength of protests on campuses.They identified
what seemed like a serious misuse of funds: massive salaries for
administrators, whose numbers were growing, at the same time that students were
facing higher fees and departments were being told to tighten belts.

This
criticism rang particularly true because it mirrored the cleavages at other
levels of our society.Services for the
working and middle classes were cut back drastically as the recession took its
toll, but tax levels for the wealthy remained largely fixed in place, and the
financial criminals whose profiteering and irresponsibility engineered the
crisis parachuted from their Wall Street towers flush with cash.That the already wealthy should be given a
reprieve when the poor struggled was bad enough.That people guilty of criminal behaviour should
be bailed out at the taxpayer expense was too much to bear.

Similarly,
as UC struggled to weather divestment by the state of California, administrators
who had not to all appearances done much to prepare for the crisis, and who
simply passed the burden down to students, were rewarded for their
lackadaisical performance.So in the
eyes of students, they became corrupt Fat Cats, and the target of virtually all
protest and ire on campus.

At
the time, I was very critical of targeting administrators for protest—not because
I disagreed with any of the injustices and inequities pointed out by their
critics, but because I believed then (and now) that they were the wrong targets.After all, with the best will in the world
and fiercest belt-tightening by the administrative class, the savings from
administrative bloat would not have corrected the real problem, which was that,
held hostage by a fundamentalist Republican Party, the state was unable to
raise funds for the university, forcing administrators to turn to students and
their families to shoulder the burden.State
politics, rather than campus offices, in other words, should have been the real
target.

Now,
several years down the road, I don’t disagree with my initial assessment.But I do see the importance of taking on administrators,
their salaries, the inequities they create on campus, and their false sense of
their own importance.

Late
last year, John Hechinger wrote about “the
troubling dean-to-professor ration” in an article of the same title.He was not writing about the University of
California in particular, but rather about the nationwide trend towards
spending increasing money on administrators at the expense of faculty and
students.These bureaucratic officers
are often charged with making the university leaner and meaner (Operation
Excellence was Berkeley’s version of this ruthless cost-cutting exercise).From administrators’ lofty offices, this
means increased “efficiency”.At the
departmental level, where students, staff and faculty operate, this means
heavier loads, service gaps, and more hardship on students in the form of
restricted class offerings, larger class sizes, and fewer resources for
navigating the expanding university bureaucracy.

In
effect, administrators are expanding the ranks of their own, namely the people
on campus who make no discernible contribution to the traditional mission of a
university: the education of students by faculty.They are expanding the ranks of the people
charged with transforming the mission of the university, reducing its
commitment to the public good, regarding students as “customers” instead of
community members, seeing education as a “market” rather than a mission, and
focusing on the short-term desires of industries rather than the long-term demands
of our society.

In
other words, the UC Regents pay other administrators bonuses to do their
jobs.To me, it is wrong and offensive
that this occurs at a public, state-owned institution, and that the bonuses go
to the people ultimately least important to UC’s mission. Faculty see their salaries stagnate, and
students see their tuition rise, and the people presiding over these worsening
conditions get bonuses!

It
is no wonder many Californians are irritated when UC’s administrators come to
them complaining about divestment, but hand out bonuses to their compatriots
and award massive compensation packages to campus Chancellors and the system’s
President.

As
students look for new ways to make the case for their relevance as a
constituency, the unjustness of record-high tuition, and the importance of the
University to California, they should make it clear that these leech-like
bureaucrats who drain UC of resources while degrading its character are not
part of the vision we are defending.I
still think the focus should be on securing funding from the state to remake UC
as a truly public institution by revisiting the state’s constitution which is
weighted down by initiatives like the undemocratic Prop 13.

But
critiquing the excess of UC’s bureaucratic elite, the indifference of its
administration, and the undemocratic character of its governing structure is
also of great importance if Californians want to reclaim their University over
the long-term.

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A
round up of recent commentary from this blog on the plight of higher education
in California:

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.